All of this semester's readings, both prose and poetry, hold onto one common trait: They all reflect a traveled path of experience that brings about profound internal change. This internal journey, which is manifest within the confines of each work, is framed by exterior social and political challenges that propel the individual characters toward`the assumption of new responsibilities and the reformulation of their personal identity.

Taking writing in the widest sense possible to include inscription, drawing, and the making and unmaking of traces, this class will focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writings about and with plants, while also considering the metaphor of “plant writing” as something performed by plants themselves. We will consider the analogy between “close reading” and the slow work of observation and description necessary to such writing.

This is a course in beginning Modern Greek, involving speaking, reading and writing.

Modern Greek is unique among languages in that it is the only modern language directly descended from Ancient Greek. In this course, the student studies reading, writing, pronunciation and use of contemporary spoken idiom, all within the historical and cultural context of the language. By the end of the course, the student should have a grammatical and linguistic foundation in Greek as it is spoken today.  In this course, there is also an emphasis and practice of oral language skills.

In the age of social media, it can be difficult to remember that not so long ago the practice of narrating the self was often closely tied to intimate, private, and even secret forms of writing. In this course, we will consider a number of literary texts that experiment with such forms of writing, focusing in particular on the genre of the diary novel.

The question of what it means to live a good life has been of perennial concern to thinkers and artists across historical periods and national boundaries. Sometimes competing visions of what it means to do the right thing leads to intractable conflict. Sometimes the fantasy of attaining the good life (for instance, in the form of the American dream) keeps us attached to particular behaviors or social structures, including ones that may actually be harmful to us.

From antiquity to the present, great art has addressed the question of how to lead a good life, as well as addressing those obstacles—fate, the gods, our own divided psyches--that have made it difficult for us to do so. They have also presented conflicting notions of what the good life is, and what its relationship is to happiness and happenstance. In this course, we will explore a range of ancient and modern takes on these questions, from Homer, Confucius, and Plato to Shakespeare and Montaigne to Harriet Jacobs and Kazuo Ishiguro.

What is a comparative poetics? Across which boundaries does poetry move—and move us? This creating writing course takes up the question of how poetry moves across form, language, media, the self, geography, and our readerly expectations. Over the course of the summer session, we will pair the practice of writing our own poetry with the critical reading of poetic texts and one another’s work. Each week of this course is organized around a theme: form(ation), translation, mixed-mediation, narrativization, re/dislocation, and experimentation.

The Statue of Liberty with welcome torch always raised. The Hollywood sign against golden California hills. Subways and freeways running like arteries above and below ground, offering to transport us around and across the city. Many iconic images of New York City and Los Angeles construct U.S. urban centers as a space of endless movement and possibility.

THIS COURSE explores three world cities located across the breadth of Asia and Europe, retracing the stories, myths, symbols and fantasies which Shanghai, St. Petersburg and Berlin have inspired. Does each of these cities have its own story? What were its cultural forms? How did these cities come to embody the thrills and challenges of modern life? Were they able to satisfy the hopes and aspirations of a large and diverse urban citizenry? How did urban culture and national history become intertwined?